Georgian director Tato Kotetishvili’s debut feature Holy Electricity had its regional premiere in competition at the Sarajevo Film Festival just days after prizes in Locarno, where it won the Cineasti del Presente’s section for bold new voices, and the Junior Jury Award — underscoring the fresh and youthful energy of a freewheeling film that is brimming with eccentric personality. We sat down with Kotetishvili in Sarajevo, where he discussed his love for improvising with non-professionals, and filmmaking as a process of “total acceptance,” intuition and trust.
“If you don’t cut straight after a scene and wait, sometimes magic happens — a dog comes by, or there’s a swirl of air. It gives a sense you’re not just watching them but also the city itself. When you’re open to chance, more things like this happen, and the universe gives you surprises. It’s like with documentary — documentarians will understand this,” said Kotetishvili.
Set in Tbilisi’s streets, junkyards and apartments stuffed with peculiar decor, Holy Electricity is a dry-humoured and episodic celebration of life on the margins, where scrabbling together enough to survive on is a constant, all-consuming hustle, but there are moments of everyday poetry in abundance. The planets at the centre of this chaotic and charming cosmos are Bart (Nikolo Ghviniashvili), a trans junk dealer in debt to gangsters, and Gonga (Nika Gongadze), a long-haired music freak, who team up for a door-to-door enterprise selling neon crucifixes.
“Everyone was a non-professional. It’s my first feature and everyone said that would be hard. I was also worried, but it was great I did it like this because it turned out to be not a problem at all and was really pleasant to shoot. If the film carries some energy it is because of these actors,” said Kotetishvili. “I liked and believed in them. If I want something and am very prepared in life it doesn’t work like this anyway, at least in our budget. I tried to let perfectionism go. But it means the editing process is long, because a lot doesn’t go in. It becomes kind of like making a puzzle — chaotic, but structured and leading somewhere.”
After a “really long search” for people with the “right energy” for Bart and Gonga, Nika Gongadze was cast as the younger lead. “He was studying the clarinet in a conservatory and dressing very conservatively, then at night listening to punk rock and drinking with friends, two very different worlds which was already interesting, and he had this energy,” said the director. Koteshvili enlisted Nikolo Ghviniashvili as Bart, integrating his trans identity and headaches over mismatched documents into the character.
Asked if he intended to make a political statement by featuring such a diverse cast of misfits, con-conformists and disenfranchised citizens at a time the Georgian government has introduced highly contentious laws against so-called LGBT “propaganda” that potentially could see films such as Holy Electricity censored, Kotetishvili, who dedicated his Golden Leopard award in Locarno to a Georgian film community currently facing “hard times,” said: “It is just natural for me, that’s how I think. It is my life vision I guess, and many things were intuitive.”
“Bart’s main problem is that he needs money, the same problem that everyone can have,” he continued. “His identity is not in the foreground because I think it’s very normal and we should be taking it like this. The problem is when people refuse to even watch a film full of crosses and with trans people, saying it’s impossible. Actually Bart is religious in real life and goes to church; everything is possible in life.”
Religion, too, is ever-present in the film, but not something Kotetishvili wanted to make a thematic focus. “That reality is there, and I was inspired by this, but I didn’t want to go deep. It is more like a background, because it’s like this in Georgia. It doesn’t matter if you are religious or not, religion is part of your life. These crosses are really there — not the small versions, but the big ones on the street — and they are beautiful actually. If it’s at night and in the mountains, you see them lit up in the air. Of course, many people capitalise on religion, so these guys also do this, but they don’t disrespect it, because actually how they start is by making a cross for Gonga’s father. But I wanted the film, most of all, to be about them,” he said.
